"And that will be your room," Kiba concludes, opening the door on a space doing much better than one may have imagined the man's bedroom to look like.
(Although, to be fair, he hasn't lived in it more than a couple of days yet, Kankurou reminds himself.)
The bed is new, with a wide frame that, to Kankurou's understanding, has been chosen this big mainly for the purpose of Kiba being able to share it with Akamaru. The bedsheets are clean and a nice dark red. There's a chest of drawers in the corner that Kiba informed him is full of his own clothes, but that he has cleared the top of so Kankurou could use it to put his belongings. Then, in the back, a closet with sliding doors and some more clothes. That's about all. There isn't even so much dog hair on the sheets.
"I'm sorry, I don't have a desk yet," Kiba apologises before pausing. "Well, I don't have a desk. Period. Let's not pretend I intended to have one later. We're going to try and keep the kitchen table clean though, so you can work there during the day. If we fail, you are allowed to just move the clutter around as much as you need."
It's not ideal, but it will have to do. Either way, he's not going to complain about it to Kiba who is about to spend weeks wrecking his back on the couch to help him in his recovery.
"If you're about to ask me if I'm sure this is okay, please just keep your mouth shut," Kiba comments.
Is he this easy to read?
"I will then."
Kiba nods.
"Good. I'm letting you settle. Dinner should be ready at eight, but you're not obligated to eat with us, so, do what you will."
"I'll be there."
He knows Kiba is sincere when saying it, and he knows it would be acceptable to take him on his offer, but he would still feel too out of place and invading if he didn't try and be polite about it, no matter how insignificant the gesture actually is for his hosts.
"Great. See you then."
The first days at the apartment work out relatively smoothly. There's definitely some unrest in him caused by the novelty of the place, the struggle to never feel really alone when there are people in the room next door, and more generally to never reach the point of, "Okay, the day is over now, I can stop playing the Being Human game and go to bed", but a lot of it, for now, is compensated by the decrease in his physical unrest now that he is both able to sit up or walk for a little bit, and in a place that gives him the space to do so.
He gets some moments of disorientation, still, especially in the trips he's still required to make to the bathroom to empty his bags usually twice a night, when remembering where he is and where he's going is not a completely simple task, and he has to navigate the living room in the dark not to wake Kiba up. But overall, he's adjusting better than he hoped he would have, and it does make a difference to be sharing the burden of keeping the space liveable with three other people (even when Kiba and Akamaru produce mess and hair at thrice the speed of a normal human being).
He's on his third day of working in the kitchen and starting to slowly consider the possibility of going back to the workshop the next week when Shino eventually meets him there and watches in silence for a moment.
"Do you need the table?"
He's admittedly invaded the space a bit.
Shino shakes his head and reaches for his phone to type a longer answer.
"You've been here for three hours," he states.
Has he now? (He has, the clock on the microwave would have told him as much if he'd looked at it.)
"I just wanted to make sure you hadn't forgotten yourself, since you aren't supposed to stay up too long."
The gesture is touching – he must admit he hadn't figured so far that Shino would be the type to look after him – but the accuracy with which people in this household anticipate him is starting to be a bit much.
Zooming out of his work for a minute now, he can tell that his temporary roommate is making a good call, though. It's not too bad, but if he forces himself to actually try and connect to his physical sensations, he has to admit that his lower back is feeling very tight and will probably make him pay for it if he doesn't take a break soon.
That, and the fact that he can't feel his right leg because he's been sitting on it for G-d knows how long.
"Right, thank you."
He first needs to clean his brushes and put all this away somewhere it can dry peacefully before anything else if he doesn't want his work of the day to be messed up before the next session.
"You're welcome," Shino types. "Kiba needs the reminder a lot. I'm conditioned to notice people being stuck in one place for too long now."
In his experience, Kiba is not really the type to stay anywhere for any amount of time, but he supposes there must be more to him when one knows him on the daily.
Shino leaves him be in silence after that, looking around the kitchen for something to eat while Kankurou gets to put his semblance of a workshop away.
Scratch the earlier statement about his spine, actually: it's most definitely making him pay already. He got so comfortable with being alone for a while and drowning in an activity that soothed him that he entirely forgot about his existence on the flesh plane and, while very pleasant in the moment, this is never a very good thing in the long run.
He lets out a deep sigh upon lying down on the couch and finally giving his overcompensating muscles an opportunity to relax for a moment. A minute later, Shino comes back from the kitchen with a plate full of apple slices and puts it on the low table before sitting on the floor and pointing at it with his chin to invite Kankurou to take some if he wishes to.
"Thanks."
Shino watches him eat in silence at first, which is a bit weird and uncomfortable, but eventually takes a piece of his own once he must feel assured enough that Kankurou is taking care of himself.
He doesn't remember when is the last time someone proactively decided to check if he was feeding himself (although Temari has certainly made sure he had enough food the past week, and probably would have said something if she had found his stock not to go down quick enough to her taste) and the casualness with which Shino does it is disconcerting.
"Have you been painting for a long time?" he asks after a couple of slices, carefully wiping his fingers on a green napkin between touching the fruit and touching his phone.
Kankurou nods.
"Almost forever. It's the only thing I asked my uncle when we moved in and he was trying to provide things that would make Temari and I feel at home. I find it quite soothing. Mesmerising, too. Well, you've noticed, evidently." Shino nods silently. "I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's a fully predictable activity, but still, there's control to it, and I like the regularity and neatness. It's a lot of muscle memory and automatisms. It quiets the brain."
The statement tears a little smirk out of Shino. It's a rare sight.
"That's why you're so good at make-up then."
"Thank you."
The guy is decidedly observant, because they haven't seen each other a whole lot in the year Kankurou has joined the band, and he on his end wouldn't be able to say what Shino's thing is. He should have paid more attention.
"Um- I hope that's not rude to ask but… What are you doing here?" That definitely sounded rude. His social brain hasn't fully caught up yet. "Not here in the living room. I meant why are you staying the day at the apartment, I thought you were going to college?"
Shino winces a bit and shakes his head, then takes a new apple slice before picking up his phone.
"I stopped. It was already difficult before but with the moving and all the changes it would have been impossible."
Through the monotonous voice of his text-to-speech software, it's not very easy to tell how he feels about it, and now Kankurou feels stupid for pointing at something probably upsetting.
"I'm sorry. I guess I'm change too right now."
Shino shrugs.
"You are," he agrees. "But I'm the one who suggested. I can take it. And you needed it. Providing for each other always comes with some sacrifice, but it's still important."
"That it is." He can tell that whatever is going on in this apartment and that Kiba and Shino have been building within their relationship until that point is special and important, that he's being integrated into it, and that it speaks to him in a way that takes him aback. "You tell me if I can do anything for you, yeah?"
Shino smiles at the question, and offers him a long blink of the same kind that Gaara (and cats) does. He will.
And then, just as Kankurou was starting to think this stay was going suspiciously well, it didn't.
"Who the fuck is Sugisawa Reiha?" he asks, glancing at the still-close envelope Hinata put to the side while sorting out the apartment mail on the kitchen table.
There aren't a lot of unsaid rules in this household. There are rules, a few, but all of which were laid down remarkably explicitly when he first got in (No entering others' bedrooms without explicit permission. No Akamaru in the bedrooms besides Kiba's. All food is okay to take unless it's in a container, in which case ask whose that is. And mark it down if you take the last of something. Don't do Shino's laundry. Please do Kiba's laundry. Rinse and wring out the kitchen sponge after every use. Dirty dishes only in the left part of the sink. No unsupervised food on the low table or Akamaru will steal it.)
Evidently, there are some rules he hasn't been made aware of, and he's just trodden brutally on one of them.
Shino and Hinata both take a short inhale at the question, the sort that one takes after dropping a bowl but before it hits the floor, bracing themself for an impact that hasn't happened yet but that is written in stone just as inevitable as if it already had. In the corner of Kankurou's field of view, Kiba stiffens on the couch, and snorts.
"It's nobody," he answers with a cutting tone, then seems to both try to move on from the statement and realise he won't be able to in the span of a second and a half, picks up the magazine he was reading on the low table, gets up with Akamaru on his tail, and slams the bedroom door behind them.
Great.
"I've just fucked up, haven't I?"
Hinata opens her mouth to say something probably a little more sensitive, but Shino signs a clear "Yes." before she can do it, and gets up to join Kiba.
"It's Kiba's legal name," she explains once the door is closed again and a muffled groan comes out through it. "His deadname, and his father's name, so it's a lot."
Kankurou doesn't know a lot about Kiba's father, and certainly not his name, but he does know Kiba arrived in the province as a kid when his mother more or less picked one child under each arm and ran away to the other side of the country, and that he hasn't spoken to him ever since, which is more than enough to imagine he might not want to hear about it unprompted.
"That's why I'm the one sorting the mail. He didn't even want to have the key to the box. All of his paychecks and tax files and everything are in Shino's room. He's been sorting and keeping them ever since they started living together. I've been browsing through it trying to catch up with everything he's swept under the rug but he has years of various admin documents to fill and send." She chuckles. "It's honestly a miracle the tax office hasn't knocked on the door yet."
"I see."
Kiba does come off as the type to postpone this sort of shit ad infinitum, for sure, but so far Kankurou would have imagined that as just an issue coming from having to sit at a table and read paragraphs of boring text full of legalese and being stressed out about ticking the wrong boxes. Not whatever just happened.
The contrast between this and the Kiba he knows is unsettling, because it makes Kankurou realise that he only knows a part of the whole. He's not upset by the fact – he supposes that's fair, they have only been seeing each other in one context for the most part after all – but he is intrigued and, admittedly, a little worried.
He probably isn't in a place to scold anyone on the matter, but seeing Kiba in his home is making him realise how much he must mask and compensate outside given the amount of external help he needs here. Hinata sorting the mail. Shino (and Akamaru) effectively acting as an alarm clock to remind him to eat and wash and sleep. The one thousand whiteboards and sticky notes all over the apartments with reminders and rules and to-do lists. The amount of vaping he does every day that Kankurou had not taken the measure of when seeing him just for rehearsals and occasional parties.
And now this.
"Do you think I should go see him or rather wait until he comes back?"
He has to admit, now, that he's the one who knows Kiba the least in this household, and that it would probably be smart to rely on the others not to fuck up this bad again.
"I think you should text Shino that you're sorry and available to talk to Kiba when it's the right time. He'll let you know."
"Do you think he hates me?"
"Kiba? No. He's just triggered. It happens and you couldn't have known, he knows that."
"I meant Shino."
Still good news, though. He'll take it
"Ah." The answer to that question seems a little more uncertain. She still shakes her head. "No. He's dry, and he might be upset that you didn't twist your tongue a bit before talking, and of course he's siding with his boyfriend, that's his role. But you'll apologise and everyone will be okay."
Sounds like a plan.
"Can I do something in the meantime?"
She takes a look around the room for a couple of seconds, then goes back to the mail.
"If you're physically up to it, everyone will appreciate some dishes done," she suggests.
Dishes. He can do that. Maybe his back will hurt, but that sounds more manageable than hanging in the void for half an hour or however long it will take Kiba to sort himself out, and wallow in guilt in the meantime.
"I'm on it."
Kankurou knocks at the door once Shino has come out of the room and given him the heads up in the form of a nod in the direction of it.
Kiba answers with an indefinite grumble.
"It's Kankurou. Can I come in?"
No definitive yes comes back to him, but a hum that he deems positive enough to be counted as explicit permission.
The door clicks softly behind him.
"Hey."
"Hey."
Kiba's voice is muffled by Akamaru's fur with how he curled himself around the dog and buried his face into his neck.
The bed is going to be covered in hair when they leave, probably.
"I'm sorry about earlier. I should have thought before opening my mouth and not snooped in something I had no business in."
Kiba snorts.
"Sounds like something I could say. But also I saved your life last time I did it, so you still owe me one."
"I do."
Kiba does, indeed, sound like he doesn't hate him.
"Are you okay?"
He shrugs, takes a big inhale, and stretches before flopping on his back on the mattress.
"I will be. I'm sorry I got mad at you. I know you didn't do it on purpose."
"No, I understand. Also, no one has ever been mad at me in a way this contained and polite," Kankurou assures. "We're more than good."
He knows that he can't take his father as a reference scale for how normal people look like and act when they are angry, but still, he doesn't think that most people would qualify "saying two words that sound a bit dry and leaving to cool off in another room" as "getting mad at someone". That Kiba would name it as such speaks volumes about the standards he holds himself to when interacting with people.
When he doesn't move and keeps staring at the ceiling obviously lost in thoughts, Kankurou speaks again.
"Do you need something?"
He isn't Shino or even Hinata. He has no idea what to do now and how Kiba works from this point on. But he can try.
"Can I have the room for another moment?"
"Of course, it's your room. Do you want the bed tonight? I can stay on the couch."
Kiba doesn't seem all too attached to the concept of personal space, in general, but Kankurou can only imagine that virtually not having been able to take time really alone for the past week is still not helping with his patience and ability to deal with unexpected frustration and aggressions.
"No. No, stay here. You need it." He waves vaguely at him. "Recovery and all that. I just need half an hour."
"Okay."
Kiba stops him when he's about to go through the door.
"Call me."
"What?"
"In half an hour. Come back and tell me to get out."
Kiba says it with his eyes closed, like he's already ready to doze off.
"Are you sure?"
His insistence, however, does make him raise his head the time to formulate an answer.
"Yes. My time management is shit and I can't spend all afternoon dissociating in bed." Kankurou must not be giving him a very convinced look right now because Kiba rolls his eyes at the sight. "Please. That will help. Make it up to me like that."
He will have to trust him on that one, presumably.
"Okay. Well. Good… dissociation? I guess?"
Kiba chuckles.
"That's the stuff. Thank you Kanks."